Marketing used to be more inspiring.
You made ads. Some worked. Some didn’t. A few broke through and became something bigger than the brief. Nobody could fully explain why. Consequently, the brand reaped fame, the CMO reaped a bonus, and other agency people whispered the agency's creatives’ names in hushed, reverent tones. Before vowing to crush them.
See? Inspiring.
That was the job. And because of that job, brands were built. Consumer allegiances formed. Cult followings. Customer evangelists. The work worked formidably and unmistakably because it was anything but predictable.
Then we lost it.
I don’t pretend to know exactly how. But I have theories - the rise of digital, shrinking CMO tenure, risk-averse practitioners - which I’ll explore later.
As consequence marketing got judged on immediate ROI. And for that, quick returns were required. Enter attribution models, dashboards, last-click optimisation and zero-based budgeting. The whole machinery of “prove it now or you’re out.”
To be fair, some of it made sense. Waste was real. Media was leaky. Measurement was inconsistent. Accountability was weak.
So marketing had to become more measurable. More defensible. More efficient. And all of it had to be demonstrated before a campaign had time to breathe. That changed what got funded. And what got funded became whatever CMOs could point to on a spreadsheet in a boardroom. Long enough to keep their jobs. Until next month, at least.
To paraphrase Mark Ritson: when short-termist return logic drives budget decisions, you inevitably overinvest in activation and underinvest in brand. Why? Because one shows up in this quarter’s numbers. The other might show up 13 months later - in revenue growth and a new generation of customers entering the category.
So budgets drifted. Brand building became harder to defend. “This is a long-term play” and “this attracts customers currently outside our category” don’t convert easily into percentages. They don’t survive a Tuesday morning review.
As a result, marketing became more exploitative and less explorative. For agency people, that’s what “I love this, but we can’t do it right now/this year/while I have this job/until Jesus comes” actually means.
The rules evolved. Exploit what worked last year. Exploit what the competition just did. Exploit the same campaign, product, narrative - because it worked last month. Anything outside that became near-blasphemy.
That’s why most of the work you see is boring and beige. Reach came through targeting, not awe. And when there’s no reward for awe - for courage, for genuine creativity - there’s no reason to explore.
Which is why there's a report that says brands lost the art of brand building. Ironically, the world's top 10 brands have grown slowest in the last decade.
How’s that for some boardroom numbers?